Governor Rick Perry speaks at the close of The Response, a call to prayer for a nation in crisis, Saturday, August 6, 2011, in Houston, Texas. Photograph: David J. Phillip/AP

Is America still a Christian country? It's obviously full of people who call themselves Christians; and certainly full of religious believers in a way difficult for many Europeans to understand or to accept. But is what modern Americans believe actually Christianity at all? When the mainstream churches went into an apparently irreversible decline towards the end of the 20th century, this was interpreted as a decline of liberal Christianity, and its replacement by fundamentalism. But is the church of Rick Warren anything more than vaguely therapeutic moralistic deism?

The question is hardly a new one. It was raised as least as long ago as the late 19th century by Henry Adams, who wondered whether the American faith in progress and in self-improvement was really the same thing as traditional Christianity. But it's still an interesting one. Has the evangelical movement turned itself into an entirely new religion, unrecognisable to "orthodox" European Christianity: a reinterpretation of the Christian myths almost as strange as Mormonism? Consider the YouTube video of a Nascar chaplain praying for all the sponsors of the event, from Toyota to Sunoco, and then thanking God for his "hot wife" before finishing with the doxology "Boogity boogity boogity. Amen". Is this really anything that traditional theologians could recognise as Christian? Or is it just a wrapper round some mixture of superstition and advertising?

Responses

Harriet Baber: Christianity in the US is collapsingSarah Posner: American Christianity: constantly reimagined, manipulated and exploitedAnthea Butler: Teavangelicals: in capitalism and free markets they trust